“Zeno Effect” Verified: Atoms Won’t Move When They’re Being Watched

Physicists from Cornell
University have proved that atoms will not move when someone is observing them. This
is also known as Zeno Effect. This particular effect was reflected as one of
the oddest predictions of quantum theory, but the experiments performed by physicists
in the Utracold Lab of Muknud Vengalattore, have now successfully confirmed it.
For the experiment Muknud Vengalattore, assistant professor of physics, and graduate
students Yogesh Patil and Srivatsan K. Chakram generated and cooled a gas of
about a billion Rubidium atoms inside a vacuum chamber and suspended the mass
between laser beams.

This is when the team
detected something exclusive: The atoms wouldn’t show any movement as long as
they were under any kind of observation. The more often the team used a laser
to measure the manners, the less movement they saw. The only way the atoms
would move was when the researchers turned down the strength of the laser, or
turned it off completely. Then the atoms organized themselves easily into a
lattice pattern, just as they would if they were crystallizing.

It must feel pretty
awesome to stop atoms just by looking at them, but there are much greater consequences
for this discovery. For instance, it demonstrates that quantum cryptography
should work— meaning an intruder can’t spy on your communications without destroying
the data.

“This gives us an
unprecedented tool to control a quantum system, perhaps even atom by atom,”
said Patil, lead author of the paper. Moreover, this work opens the door to a
fundamentally new method to manipulate the quantum states of atoms and could
lead to new kinds of sensors, explains the Cornell Chronicle.

This
post was written by Umer Abrar. To contact the author of this post, write to mirzavadoodulbaig@gmail.com
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6 comments:

The skeptics said the same thing about the 2 slit experiment, that the waves either collapsed into a particle or remained a wave depending on rather they were being interacted with by scientific equipment or not, not rather they were being observed. Then further experiments were done proving it was the act of observation interacting with the particles, NOT the scientific equipment.

Probably it is enough to use some experimental equipment (in this case, lasers), in order to get some objective representation of the phenomenon, to change someway the property of the system and the behavior of the atoms involved. Therefore I think that the approach to data measuring should be improved in a very subtle way, with the purpose of not altering the environment we're trying to study.